Did something break? there was a stale block about four hours ago and the payment queue has been empty since then... or is that expected behavior when a stale pops up?
Pool always drops into safety standby when a stale block pops up. While in that mode, the pool sends mined coins to the pool's cold wallet. This is why the payout queue grows over time. Then wk will make a manual payout from the cold wallet, which shrinks the queue back down. We are a bit overdue for such a manual payout at the moment, but I've been mining with the pool for more than a year now, and wk always makes it right in the end.